Devil Forest Read online

  Username: The Ferryman

  Comment: F

  That was all it said. Not much I could gleam from that, really. The guy hadn’t left a comment by mistake, since he’d bothered to type a username.

  Maybe he got interrupted, or something. It would probably be a troll comment, anyway. The last comment we got was a troll who told Jeremiah he was a bloated blimp of bullshit.

  I went onto the next post, showing a photograph of an old cottage. Now that was a spooky case.

  But scanning what I’d written, there was nothing special about it. We had seen nothing, despite the owners' claims that things got scary at night.

  Despite that, there was something.

  A comment.

  The Ferryman

  Comment: O

  It was too early for this kind of crap. My brain felt like it had been shrink-wrapped.

  F-O. That was what the Ferryman commented so far. Maybe just a drunk guy who’d stumbled on the blog and couldn’t even type a full sentence.

  As I stared at it again, I bolted upright in my chair. The café owner stopped mid-way through filling a shelf with cakes and stared at me, her eyes wrought with something. Surprise? Suspicion?

  “Sorry,” I said.

  I couldn’t take my eyes away from the text above the comment.

  My phone rang, vibrating in my rucksack.

  “Hello?”

  “Ella?”

  It was a woman’s voice, familiar but I couldn’t place her straight away. There was an edge to it I didn’t like. Not panic, but certainly worry.

  “Ella, it’s Georgina. I live in the flat above yours.”

  “I know who you are Georgina,” I said. The poor woman was in the early stages of dementia. She was still clinging to independence, strong as hell and not ready to give up the way she wanted to live. But every time we talked I got the sense things were flaking away.

  “I…er…heard noises from your flat, dear. I know you said you were leaving for the weekend. Have you gone anywhere nice? Are you with a boy? You should settle down. You’d make a nice-”

  “What noises?” I asked, my breath catching in my chest.

  “People talking and arguing. They sounded angry. I almost called the police, but I thought maybe you didn’t leave.”

  “Are you sure it was my flat?” I said.

  “I could hear them in the floorboards. Whispering. They seemed angry at something.”

  I felt my cheeks flush. It was getting too hot in the cafe; I needed air.

  Stepping out onto the street, I felt the breeze tease cold calm over me, and I could think about things logically again. Relief swept through me.

  “It must have come from another flat,” I said. “Maybe Mr. Teorginos in number six. It couldn’t have been my flat.”

  “I knew this would worry you. But-”

  “Trust me,” I said. “After the break in, I had a smart alarm fitted. It would have pinged me if anyone was in my flat.”

  “If you say so. You’re sure you don’t want me to call the police?”

  “Let me check my camera. I’ll call them if there’s anything wrong. Thanks, Georgina. It was sweet of you to tell me.”

  Back in the café, I opened the home camera app on my phone. I’d set up a smart camera in every room. It wasn’t as expensive as I’d imagined, since these things were everywhere these days.

  The camera worked on motion, so they’d only record if someone had walked around in my flat after I turned them on.

  I checked the activity log. There shouldn’t have been a listing after 5am, when I left to go to the train station.

  But looking at the app, I felt my brain begin to swell.

  -8-

  There were five notifications, each from a different camera. Each one a video that was recorded when movement triggered a sensor in my flat.

  I swallowed, and my throat felt like dried bark. Steeling myself, I played the videos from the recorded videos; kitchen, bathroom, living room, two bedrooms.

  All I saw was the glow of the cameras’ night vision, and the only noise was a faint hissing like an untuned radio with the volume down. No voices, no people.

  I checked the entry log. There was an alarm contact on my front door and every window, and if anyone had tried to get in, it would have triggered it by now.

  Nothing. No entries. Was it glitching? Testing it, I set and unset my alarm from 200 miles away - the joy of modern technology, right?

  It worked just as it should. I sighed. Standing outside the café, the wind cooled down the sweat that had built on my forehead while Georgina had told me the news.

  Blaketree was getting busy now; a milkman leaving bottles on shop steps. A headphone-wearing paperboy stuffing bundles of paper through letter-boxes. A guy walking four bull terriers at once, but completely in control, their obedience to him was so great that a single look stopped them straining on their leashes.

  Just village people doing village stuff, going about their day. That’s what I needed to do, too.

  I should probably get back to my laptop. Check out the rest of the blog, and then maybe interview some people in Blaketree. Nothing heavy, just for background.

  One of the few other comments I ever got on the blog was how people enjoyed the research I put into it. The local flavour I gave each post. Ever since then, I had tried to do more of that.

  As I pushed open the café door, it wasn’t the trill of its bell I heard, but a ping from my phone.

  And seeing it made me feel like I had a rock in the pit of my stomach.

  PIR #3

  Living room

  Status: Movement detected

  My phone rang. Answering it, I heard a robotic voice. “This is an alert from Touchstone Fire and Alarm. PIR number three has been activated on Wednesday 3rd March at…”

  I hung up. Damn robots, damn shoddy equipment. I wanted security, but I hadn’t been able to afford the package with manned alert centres that would call the police for you.

  With the package I bought, it was my responsibility to see what the deal was and call the police. So now, I had to see what had set PIR 3 off.

  PIR meant passive infrared sensor according to the engineer who’d installed my system. I’d asked him a bunch of questions because I was interested in how it worked. He must have gotten sick of me after a while, but curiosity was always my problem.

  Now, I was less curious, and more apprehensive. If someone was in my flat, they’d trigger the sensor, and that would make the cameras start recording.

  That meant that if it was a person who had just set off PIR 3, I’d have to see actually them in my flat.

  I felt my left hand shake. I clenched it. I accessed PIR #3 on my app.

  A night-vision green view of my living room appeared on the screen. I realised that I had left my curtains closed. That was stupid; as soon as it got fully light, that’d look weird. An invitation for opportunist burglars.

  I looked at the green spectre of my flat, bracing myself for a figure to move in the darkness.

  Nobody was in the room.

  I flicked from sensor to sensor, cycling through my flat - nothing.

  My heartbeat wouldn’t slow down. Even the idea that someone could be in my home again sent fireworks of dread shooting through me.

  I had to calm down. Nobody was there, and I had the proof in my hands. That was the whole point of the system.

  As if in answer, more pings sounded.

  PIR #3

  Living room

  Status: Movement detected

  PIR #4

  Bedroom

  Status: Movement detected

  PIR #5

  Bathroom

  Status: Movement detected

  What the hell?

  The dread became a pulse of fear, and my heart thrummed.

  I checked PIR #2 – nothing.

  PIR #4 – nothing.

  “This fucking thing is faulty.”

  I cycled to PIR #5, in the bathroom. Nothing.
>
  My phone pinged, but it wasn’t the security app this time. It wasn’t a text, either.

  And it wasn’t my phone. It was the café owner’s.

  Jesus, I was on edge.

  Two energies surged in me. One, the current of dread that had been building and building. Another, a new surge of excitement, despite everything. No sense denying it – a small part of me felt alive with this kind of thing.

  Sure, nothing had been in my flat, but the idea had excited me and terrified me at the same time.

  This was why I worked with Jeremiah. It was why I put up with his grumpy attitude, with travelling around the country with low pay, wildly inconsistent hours.

  In Scotland, I had looked beyond the fabric of our reality and seen something else.

  And once you see that, you can’t forget it.

  I guessed that doing that, getting answers, was why I accepted Jeremiah’s job offer. When you put it under the microscope, my whole life was a mess of questions.

  I remember when I was six years old, and Mum and Dad were out somewhere and I was staying home with Juliette, my babysitter. She was eighteen and trying to earn some money in the summer before university. I just remember bugging her to see if I could stay awake until my parents got home.

  “You won’t give in, will you?” Juliette said. “I want you in your pyjamas and ready to bolt upstairs as soon as we see a car pull up. You could at least pretend to be in bed.”

  I hugged Juliette. I loved her in a way that went beyond affection and turned into to idolisation. I cut holes in my t-shirts using Mum’s sewing scissors so my clothes would look like hers. That sent Mum ballistic.

  So staying up was half about waiting up for Mum and Dad, half getting to stay up with Juliette. The best of everything. I remember how happy I was.

  Then there was a knock on the door.

  Sometimes, things happen before you know how significant they are. Someone knocking on the door wasn’t a big deal. Nowadays, the sound is burned in my memory. Three loud thuds. I could write an essay on that sound; on the weight behind each knock, on how the pause between each thud was because the officer outside didn’t really want the door to open and to have to deliver the news.

  Even now, I can’t stand people knocking on my door. I only rent my flat in Manchester, but I got permission from the landlord to install a doorbell. I can’t stand the sound.

  Back then, it hadn’t taken on its significance.

  “Has she got close family?” I heard a police officer ask Juliette. Her makeup was smeared around her eyes and she was smoking in the house – against the rules! – and breathing in to keep calm.

  “What happened?” Juliette asked.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  We don’t know yet.

  It became a shield the police used to deflect my questions as I grew up. I just wanted to know what happened to my parents. How did they die?

  After that night, they passed me around like a book. From six years old to twelve I stayed with a foster couple who hated their house, hated each other, and eventually hated me.

  They were rich in money but dirt poor in their souls, and mealtimes were a frozen Stalingrad battleground. I still remember them. The frigid air and hateful stares. I hadn’t asked them to foster me, but they resented me so, so much.

  Next was some of the happiest years I’d had since my early childhood. Stan and Helen, an older, childless couple, took me in. They were both in their early fifties, and they were fostering because they had a lot of love to give, but no kids of their own.

  I shared their home, and it was a place of warmth. They’d laugh with me, they’d console me when I was upset, they’d answer questions I had about mum and dad as best as they could. I started calling Stan ‘Dad.’

  When he became ill, and he passed away, I went to another family, who were okay. I stayed with them until I was eighteen, and then I moved out. I went to university, and I made the odd phone call to them, sent Christmas cards, but we eventually lost contact.

  So then I was an adult, and I was living by myself. And I still didn’t have the answers. After all this time, the police still couldn’t work out what had happened to my parents, and the case had long since gone cold, the box containing its files joining the boxes and boxes of unsolved deaths in the police archives.

  I’d tried looking into it myself. All I had to go on was that they were driving home after eating at a restaurant called the Belize and then having a drink at a rum bar a few streets down. Presumably Dad didn’t drink, since he was driving. It's hard to say for sure.

  All we know is on the way home, they collided with a white van, the kind sole-traders use. Apparently people heard the smash from a neighbourhood away, and both vehicles were write offs.

  But they never found my parents’ bodies, and they never found who was driving the van. It belonged to a guy named Pete Ribbons, but he’d been at home with his wife and four kids, watching a re-run of an Inspector Morse mystery.

  It was the kind of accident that had just enough mystery to make it onto internet lists. 'Top ten mysterious deaths,' and that kind of thing. It was hard not to look at them, not seek them out.

  There were just so, so many questions, and they held me back all my life. It was like I’d grieved for them as much as I could, but there was always a patch of grief inside me, hidden like weeds, always spreading. Until I got answers about what happened, I’d never get rid of them completely.

  I guess that was why I accepted Jeremiah’s job offer. He wanted answers for things that defied them. Sometimes his investigations took him to haunted asylums, mills and hospitals. But sometimes we looked into more personal investigations.

  A family haunted by a dead grandparent, that kind of thing. So they thought, anyway. Even if we discovered that the haunting was only a set of coincidences given more meaning by wilful believers, at least we gave people some answers and a sense of closure.

  Closing the app, I made a call to a private security company. These weren’t the same guys who’d installed my alarm because I didn’t want to put all my trust in one organisation.

  Instead this security company, for a fee, would keep a copy of a person’s keys, and they’d go check out any disturbances. They were heavily regulated and came with glowing reviews from across the country, so I was happy to use them.

  “My alarm app picked up something. Can you just ask someone to look around?” I told the customer service agent.

  “Certainly. We can have a security agent at your flat within an hour and they’ll call you.”

  “Thanks. Sorry if I sounded a little irate, it’s-”

  “That’s okay; it can be stressful. Your identification code is 4508. When our rep checks your flat and calls you, ask him for the code.”

  “Got it. Thanks.”

  I went back into the café and sat down in front of my laptop. I set my phone down. Time suddenly seemed slowed; the café owner was lazily wiping down counters, and the ticks of the clock seemed drawn out.

  I needed to occupy my mind.

  A picture of Jeremiah – he’d insisted on having his face on the navigation bar – stared at me from my laptop.

  The blog. The Ferryman.

  He’d left two comments on the oldest posts on the blog, so far writing nothing except F-O.

  It wasn’t the letters that had made a morbid curiosity churn in my gut. It was the post stamp; the Ferryman had left the comments twenty-five minutes earlier that morning.

  Was it a coincidence that on the same morning we went to investigate something, not only did Jeremiah get stopped on a train, not only did my smart alarm flip its lid, but someone made their mark on the graveyard that was the comments section of Jeremiah’s blog?

  It was way too much crap, and it was way too early to try to shovel it.

  I clicked next post, which took me to a page I’d written last year. A cottage on the east coast, a kind of place full of tourists May through to August and then a ghost town for the rest o
f the year.

  A family said that their house was haunted by the spirit of an old witch-finder who hadn’t found death too big an obstacle in his career, and had targeted the eldest teen daughter as a potential spell-user.

  If only that were true.

  Sometimes, reality is scarier than any ghost a person can conjure up.

  Reading to the end of the post, I saw the comments section, and a name popped out.

  One comment, where before there had been none.

  User: The Ferryman

  Comment: L

  Any prizes for guessing that he’d commented on everything I wrote?

  I zoomed through the archives, whizzing through our investigations of abandoned hospitals, a nightclub that used to be a school for blind kids, a haunted block of houses in the suburbs of Liverpool.

  The ferryman had touched each one, breaking the previously unbroken grounds of the comments sections.

  By the time he’d stopped commenting he had left nine more messages, each one just a single letter. Seemingly random, definitely from someone with too much time on their hands. Viewed individually, the comments were best left ignored.

  But, if I put all of the comments together…

  A shadow loomed over my table, startling me.

  I half-expected it to be the kind of guy who’d call himself the Ferryman and leave cryptic messages on blogs, but it was the café owner.

  She was in her late forties, had an easy smile and an early-morning perkiness I envied. She held a jug of filtered coffee. “Top up?”

  “Thanks.”

  As she poured coffee into my cut she said, “Tell me I’m nosey, but you aren’t a tourist, are you?”

  “What gave me away?”

  “The laptop, and the fact that you’re in here. Most of the locals are pissed off at me.”

  “Why?”

  “Just small-town bullshit, love. Don’t worry; it’s a nice place to stay for a while. Just don’t look too closely. The closer you look at Blaketree, the more chance you’ll ruin the dream. Why are you here?”